Rapid prototyping maid figurine wows nanotech conference attendees

At a nanotech trade show a couple of years ago, Japanese company Nakamura Choko unveiled this figurine replica of a maid created using a non-contact 3D digitizer and a rapid prototyping machine. The process was simple--scan human with digitizer, adjust with modeling tool, hit print--but the real question was, why would a materials manufacturer dress their booth babe up as a maid and then shrink her with a 3D printer? The answer: maids sell. Ever since maid cafes became big in Tokyo,a girl in a frilly French maid costume has guaranteed at least marginal popularity to pretty much anything. Nakamura figured that, since most of the people attending this trade show were science geeks, they would flock the maid booth like flies on fresh poop. [via Tech-On! (Japanese)]

What’s really odd here is that the figurine that the woman is holding clearly was not produced from a direct scan of herâ€”I mean, they’re both in French main outfits, but they’re different. Not that I inspected them very closely or anything {ahem}.

Looks like they only scanned the face, and then applied it to a maid model… and did so badly, as they are out of scale in respect to each other, which wrecks the quality of the final output considerably.

Very cool idea, but poor execution. I give them points for trying though.

the replica is wearing a different apron than the live model. The replica has a bow tie, the live model has wide white collars. The replica has “cat” ears, the live model is wearing a frilly hat. The replica’s hair stops at her collar, the live model’s hair goes down to her shoulders.